Meta's Feel-Good AI Ad Chose a Song About the End of the World
The company wanted uplift and optimism. David Bowie wrote about Earth dying in five years. The gap between the two tells you something.
Key points
- Meta posted an Instagram ad on Thursday using David Bowie's 1972 song "Five Years," which is about the imminent end of the world.
- The ad skips the song's opening verse, which begins with a news anchor weeping because Earth is dying.
- Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan cited a Bowie quote about optimism to defend the choice, but Bowie's own drummer described recording it as "pretty depressing."
- Music publication Pitchfork's deputy director told Wired AI the choice seems "either really ignorant or really insidious."
- The ad joins a recent wave of tech company campaigns trying to reassure the public that AI will not make life worse.
Meta posted a new ad to its Instagram account Thursday morning. Upbeat visuals, a warm narrator, families laughing, a toddler chasing a butterfly, NBA star Jalen Brunson waving at a New York Knicks championship parade. The message: artificial intelligence will not "make us less connected" or "leave us behind."
The soundtrack was Bowie's "Five Years." Written in 1972, it opens with a news anchor crying on air because the planet has five years left to exist.
Meta used a different section of the track, a verse about crowds of people and a brain so full it had no room to spare. The opening apocalypse verse did not make the cut.
Did Meta know what the song was about?
Yes, apparently. When asked, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan pointed to a 1972 Bowie quote: "People are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism." The quote came via BowieBible.com, a fan archive.
BowieBible.com also describes the song as "a dystopian nightmare in which Earth enters its final five years" involving "panic, violence, and attempts at redemption." Bowie's drummer, Mick Woodmansey, said in a 2018 interview that the band knew it was about the end of the world. "I remember when we recorded it, he was actually in tears," Woodmansey said.
Jeremy Larson, deputy director at music publication Pitchfork, noted to Wired AI that repurposing songs for ads is standard practice. Warner Chappell Music controls Bowie's catalog and makes those calls. But he added that "Meta choosing this specific song where the context for human connection is the apocalypse seems either really ignorant or really insidious."
Why are tech companies making these ads at all?
Because they need to. A growing number of people worry that AI will make life harder, not easier, and the products themselves are not always winning that argument alone.
A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an ad that opened with a burning building and flashed across rows of graves before turning optimistic. Google ran a 2024 ad where a father used its Gemini AI to ghostwrite a fan letter from his daughter to an Olympic athlete, which many viewers found more unsettling than charming.
The bleakest example predates AI. During the 2022 Super Bowl, the collapsed crypto exchange FTX ran an ad starring Larry David mocking every invention in history, then dismissed FTX critics as fools. FTX filed for bankruptcy roughly nine months later.
For ordinary viewers, the pattern is worth noticing. When a company spends heavily to convince you its product is not harmful, it is worth asking why that reassurance is necessary in the first place. That is not cynicism. It is just a reasonable question.
